That would allow Cheema and his U.K. collaborators to test drugs against motor neurone disease, for which there is currently no known cure.

Motor neurone disease affects the nerves that provide the stimulus to the muscles through which we move, breathe, eat and drink.

Scientist don't know what causes the disease and doctors can't diagnose it early. Everybody with the disease dies, usually within five years of being diagnosed. Cheema said one person dies from the disease each day in Australia.

Cheema's group is researching a type of motor neurone disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Cheema is working with the U.K. biotechnology company Daniolabs, in Cambridge, to create transgenic zebra fish.

Together, they have injected a faulty gene that causes a particular type of ALS, known as familial ALS, into zebra fish eggs minutes after they were fertilised.

The SOD1 gene is faulty because it cannot code for a protein that protects cells from free radicals, agents that can damage and kill cells.

Cheema said they could tell if the microinjection process worked and the foreign gene was expressed because the injected gene also carried a piece of DNA encoding a green fluorescent protein. If the faulty gene is expressed the zebra fish will glow green under fluorescent light.

"Now we are waiting to see if the microinjected zebra fish, which are now a few months old, develop the disease," Cheema said. The group also hopes to find out if the injected gene is passed on to future generations.

If the zebra fish develop ALS, Cheema's group will add drugs to their water or inject the fish with drugs to see if they can cure ALS.

Cheema said that this sort of drug testing was not possible using rats or mice as there are tens of thousands of drugs to be tested.

The advantage of using zebra fish is that they are cheaper than mice, reproduce and develop quickly, and have a similar nervous system to humans, he added.

The Cambridge group has already used zebra fish to develop a model to study retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative disease of the eye that leads to tunnel vision. So Cheema's team is "hopeful that they can do the same for ALS".